The Spirit Lens (11 page)

“Sonjeur de Duplais is King Philippe’s cousin, Master Dante,” stated the lady firmly, “engaged to acquire and catalog books. If you need manual labor, we can fetch a workman.”

“He might be the Pantokrator’s maiden aunt for all I care. He does what I tell him in the manner I prescribe or he’s no good to me and might as well dive headfirst out the window right now. Is that understood?”

Arrogant. Unyielding. Ungraceful. Even the cool Damoselle ney Billard fumed.

“I serve at the queen’s pleasure, Master,” I said quickly. “To that end, I shall be honored to take on whatever tasks you assign and to learn whatever you might teach.” Especially why a man who disdained common sorcerous practice needed a circumoccule, a ring used to enclose particles arranged for traditional spellworking. And to learn why he had dragged me into a position that would make our investigation impossible. And to learn why this chamber thrummed as if a hundred musicians played at once, all of them different tunes.

Raising my brows and venturing a grin to soothe the lady’s concerns, I shrugged out of my wrinkled doublet and bent to the work, first reheating the smoldering end of the stick—once a chair rung, I guessed—then shoving it through the gouge. Soot and char brought a minimal useful balance of spark, air, and wood to spells that focused heavily on the elements of base metal and water. A standard practitioner would embed other preferred particles into a permanent ring—fragments of colored glass, perhaps, or a few well-chosen herbs, and always nuggets or links of silver—the most perfect substance, encompassing all five of the divine elements. But who knew what Dante’s plan was? The sulfur bespoke unsavory complexities.

“Get it hotter and move faster,” snapped Dante. “The wood must be well seared as I lay down the lead.”

“Very well then,” said the administrator, equanimity recovered, though the toe of her elegantly small foot tapped rapidly on the ruined floor. “Have Sonjeur de Duplais bring a list of your additional requirements to my office this afternoon. Shall I have these excess furnishings removed?”

“Aye,” said Dante, carefully ladling the first dipper of molten lead into a charred segment of the groove. “And the window rags as well. They’re useless and ugly. I’ll keep yon bed and the eating table and such.” He jerked his head toward an open doorway in the end wall. “And you can leash your simpering maidservants and prancing footmen. None sets foot in my chambers unless I give them leave. The assistant will clean what needs cleaning. Now out with you, and let us to our work.”

“Certainly, Master. Divine grace, and to you also, Sonjeur de Duplais. As I mentioned earlier, I am at your service.” The lady gazed at me intently, communicating a sincere concern and intent to help, which pleased me considerably. I acknowledged her kindness as well as I could from my ungraceful posture on the floor.

My task completed, I sat back on my heels. I expected Dante would stop once Maura had gone, but in fact his focus narrowed, his capable left hand dribbling an almost perfect thread of molten lead in the grooved circle. It was easy to overlook his doing almost everything one-handed. His ruined appendage had remained out of sight the entire time the lady was in the room. A touch of vanity, perhaps.

When he had closed the circle of lead, he returned his ladle to the empty crucible and used his staff to disperse the pile of white-hot coals across the floor of the hearth. If I hadn’t been watching so carefully, I might have missed the moment when he pressed his narrow lips together as if muting a word they were intending to shape. The coals dulled instantly and fell to ash. For that one moment, I would have sworn I’d gone naked and feathers stroked my skin.

Dante rose, hurried to the windows, and threw open the casements, clinging to the iron frames as he heaved great breaths of the morning air. “Discord’s realm . . . This place is going to drive me mad.” Then he spun in place, his gaunt face hungry, his green eyes snapping and sparking like the fires of midsummer. “But it will be a fine madness, student. We’ve so much nastiness afoot in Castelle Escalon, it will take us a year to sort it out. They’ve found another corpse—another mule.”

CHAPTER FIVE

11 QAT 50 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

I
t was an unfortunate fact that the actual blood of someone like me could so dramatically enhance another sorcerer’s spellmaking, when it could not provide me enough power to work magic of my own. Transference, the direct infusion of magical blood into a sorcerer’s veins, had been practiced since the awakening of magic. A few practitioners bled themselves, distilled the product, and reinfused their own strengthened ichor. But as this led determinedly to self-destruction, most incidents of transference involved an unwilling victim, leeched to provide magical sustenance for the unscrupulous. Some blood family’s bastard, feeble-minded brother, or demented aunt might “wander off” or “take a sudden fever,” perhaps to reappear bruised, pale, and scarred, perhaps never to be seen again.

Until the practice had exploded into a plague of abduction, torture, and murder in service of the grand power rivalries that came to be called the Blood Wars, no one had acknowledged its use among otherwise respectable members of the Camarilla Magica. And only then did ordinary Sabrians learn of mules—victims repeatedly bled until their veins collapsed and their minds disintegrated. The Temple tetrarchs declared that the mules’ souls bled away as well, an irretrievable corruption.

The Concord de Praesta, the accord that ended the Blood Wars, required every mage to wear the permanent silver collar that supposedly kept his or her workings well scrutinized. And all children born to the blood were permanently marked on the back of the left hand and required to display that mark at every encounter, warning others that we might be purveyors of illicit magic. Abductions were punishable by death, and promiscuity among blood families by public penance and heavy fines, lest unrecorded bastards provide temptation for evildoers—or provide more evildoers. Despite all such precautions, it appeared that someone was bleeding poor sods into mindless idiots right under the nose of the Camarilla, the Temple, the king, and the educated citizenry of Merona. Two mules discovered within a tenmonth would strike fear in any heart. It could not be coincidence.

“A mule, are you sure?”

“Yestermorn the queen’s chief panderer summoned me to his chambers.” Dante perched on the broad window seat, the sunlight at his back. His white staff lay across his lap. “This Orviene, as sweet a talker as any marketplace barker, was wheedling at me to tell where I’d trained, and dancing about talk of necromancy. He even offered to lend books and materials, though revealing naught of his own skills or current work, to be sure. Yon crucible and such came from his stock, so I decided to make good use of them while I waited for you to arrive. Never thought to hear you’d got yourself thrown in jail. You were to be the
hidden
partner.”

“Exactly so,” I said. “So Orviene told you of the mule?”

“No. The woman Gaetana’s chambers are right across the passage from Orviene’s. While I was with Orviene, one of her adepts brought her a message that ‘the verger would not release the dead mule.’ ”

“Are you sure you heard the report accurately from such a distance?” Across a passage?

“I’ve a spell . . . my staff . . . it’s not important.”

“Not
important
?” Sorcery could trick the senses; it could not alter their quality, any more than it could enable a man to eat poison without consequence.

“Gaetana was furious. Agitated. She felt”—he closed his eyes and waved his hands about his head as if grasping for the right word—“betrayed. This . . . this mule’s death . . . this risk of their exposure . . . isn’t supposed to be happening, which means we must take advantage before they seal whatever wall of secrets has been breached.”

“Without thinking hard, I can devise fifty possibilities that would bring an agitating message to Gaetana. The last thing we need is to fly off on imaginings.”

“I
must
see that corpse,” he said. “You are the planner, the leader, so make it happen before they burn the creature.”

Impossible that he could have surmised so much from a message muffled by two walls and a passageway. Yet his belief was as undeniable as a hurricane.

“All right. I’ll do what I can. Find the deadhouse. Get you in there today.” And then find a way to renege on my agreement with Damoselle Maura without jeopardizing my chances for Ilario’s position. “Surely you could have come up with a simpler scheme to see the body than to engage me as your assistant. Something to do with Orviene’s questions, the deadraising . . .”

“But they’ve no idea I know about the mule. Don’t you see? If they suspect I can hear beyond walls, they’ll never trust me near them.”

Unreasonably reasonable. “All right. But I cannot work with you beyond this. I
must
have the freedom of opportunity Lord Ilario’s employ can give me.”

“Do what you must, but get me in to see this new corpse. What use is a plan if it hides the very truth we need to examine?”

That was inarguable.

I hadn’t even poked my arms into my discarded doublet when the mage dragged a crate of jumbled metal strips, spools, and packets into the center of his circumoccule. “Hold on. We’ve work to do while you consider your course. Lay the strips of tin to either side of the lead. The bronze links should lie at the sixteen compass points. You
are
capable of determining true compass headings, are you not?”

My bewildered fumbling for my compass must have impressed him as a
no
, for he snatched up his staff, rubbed his thumb on some particular bit of carving, and used the soot stick to place sixteen marks on the scarred mahogany rim of his circle.

“Braid the linen, cotton, and silk thread together and lay it around the outer edge. Then fill in all the gaps and holes with wood shavings; there’s a rasp in the box, and I don’t care which wood you use. Spread a thin layer of sand over all. When you’ve done, I’ll seal the ring with fire.”

Exasperated, I shook my head. “Master, I’m not going to—”

“I might as well have use of you while you’re in my service. Meanwhile I’ll write the list of materials I need from that housekeeper or whatever she is. She pities you, so you should be able to get whatever I want. I doubt she’ll be so generous when I’m on my own again.” He vanished into the other room.

Mumbling unseemly responses at his vanished back, I snatched up the spall pouch I had laid aside with my doublet. I had no intention of continuing his humiliating little game of master and servant now Maura had gone. But as my thumb traced the outline of the red jasper tessila inside the heavy little bag, the glimmering of a plan took shape. A Damoselle Maura who pitied me could surely tell me where to find the palace deadhouse, and Dante’s list would give me a perfect excuse to seek her out right away. Grumbling, I threw my doublet aside, knelt inside the circumoccule, and bent to the mage’s work.

As I crawled about the sooty floor placing the metal and braided threads and converting the rest of a broken chair into splinters and shavings enough to fill the trough, I considered what else we needed to know about the dead mule. But the odd construction of Dante’s circumoccule soon distracted me. Sand created a dispersed weight of base metal and wood. Braided threads effected proximity of silk’s component water and linen’s wood. But why cotton? The juxtaposition of particles fit no formula I knew. I argued with myself that Dante’s chosen materials were not based on the balance of the five elements, but rather on this keirna he believed in, and then wondered for the fiftieth time if his magic relied upon particles at all. By the time I’d poured a thin layer of sand from the hearth box atop the filled ring, I was wholly filthy and wholly confused.

“I’ve finished, Master,” I said, poking my head through the doorway in the end wall, “and I—”

Dante sat at a small writing desk next to an open window. The desktop was littered with paper, pens, and an ink bottle, and he’d wedged a small knife blade into the wood at one side, which puzzled me until the scattered shavings explained that this was how a man with one useful hand sharpened his quills. But the mage was not writing and did not acknowledge my presence. His elbow rested on the desk, and his forehead rested on his curled left fist as if he were in the deepest contemplation. His staff, wedged in the claw of his damaged hand, quivered almost imperceptibly.

“Master, are you ill?” I whispered, not truly believing it so. His posture was too deliberate, the vibrant energies of the small room as vivid as midsummer sunlight along Aubine’s seacoast.

Indeed he did not move or answer, and I lowered myself to the tidy bed lined up against the adjoining wall. This was a much smaller chamber than the other, intended as a wardrobe or manservant’s quarters, scarce room to walk between the bed, the desk, the night cupboard, and a small table. At the foot of the bed, atop an unopened traveling case, sat a worn leather satchel, stuffed to bursting with books and papers. Nowhere did I spy altar stone, tessila, spall pouch, or the smallest ikon of the Pantokrator. Not only was he heathen, but he didn’t care who knew it, a more honest display than some of us dared.

The open satchel tempted me to discover what books he valued, but a distant bell striking the quarter hour stayed my hand. Just as well, for only moments later, Dante stirred and propped his staff against the wall. Grimacing, he massaged his temple, then ran his fingers down the scribbled papers on the desk as if to remind himself of what he’d written. “Are you finished yet, student?” he bellowed, without lifting his attention from the page. “Time passes.”

“A while ago, Master,” I said, childishly pleased that he near knocked over his chair as he jerked around to find me so near. “You’re not ill.” A statement, not a question.

“No.” Curt and stone-faced, he gathered a stack of sheets and passed them over. “Here’s what I need to begin work—both on the mystery and the deadraising—and enough things I
don’t
need to confuse anyone who reads the list. The last page tallies books. Most I’ve only heard about; don’t know if they really exist. Perhaps you’ll know better ones.”